Not free, but very reasonably priced and extremely full-featured for e-mail hosting is fastmail.fm. Their $40/year "Enhanced" individual account will let you do your own domain (I have one of these accounts and use to manage the DNS and e-mail forwarding for several domains). It's a little cheaper if you buy more than one year at a time, too.

Of course if you really love Google Apps, then it's probably worth spending the extra few dollars for that as it also includes all the calendaring and other features.